Will thread be killed before the activity finishes in Android?

Question

In Android, I have a thread that initializes a global variable. The thread starts when the activity starts. If the activity finishes before the thread initialized the global variable will the thread still run in the background to complete its job or it will be killed as the activity finishes?

Answer 1

The Activity finishing is part of the main execution/UI thread in android. When you spawn a new thread, and perform operations on that thread, it works as a separate entity from the main UI thread.

Hence, to answer your question - The thread will still run in the background to complete its job.

However, a word of caution. If within the run() method, you are using some objects that are part of the activity class that just got terminated, you can run into null pointer exceptions.